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Compliments of the Author 



DDnDDD 

Shakespeare ivas an intellectual globe, so vast that 
we can not grasp it with the puny fingers of our 
intelligences — clear as crystal, firm as adamant, 
flawless in surface, solid in content — it yet gave to 
"airy nothings a local habitation and a name." 

nnanna 



©CLA-iOOlOS 
Copyrighted, March, 1917, by H. G. Larimer, Topeka, Kansas 

MAR 31 1917 






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(Written April 22, 1916) 

GUESSES. 

William Shakespeare was baptized in the parish 
church of Stratford-on-Avon, England, April 26, 
1564, supposed to be the third day after his birth. 
His father was a tradesman of the town and his 
mother a descendant of a very ancient family. 
Shakespeare attended the free school of Stratford 
where he "learned the little Latin and less Greek" 
attributed to him by his contemporary, Ben Jonson. 
At the age of eighteen years he was married to Anne 
Hathaway, a woman ten years his senior. 

In 1586 or 1587 he left home for London. In 
1589 he ivas a joint proprietor in the Black friars 
theater. Before 1592 he was well known as an actor 
and a playwright. In 1593 he published his poem of 
Venus and Adonis, dedicated to Lord Southampton, who 
became his lifelong friend and patron. His first known 
play, "Henry the Sixth," was written in 1593 and 
from then on in rapid succession followed his thirty- 
seven dramas, the most precious possessions in liter- 
ature. Shakespeare gained the favor of Queen Eliza- 
beth and accumulated a fair-sized fortune as a theoMr 
oivner. The last feiv years of his life he retired to 
Stratford, purchasing the largest house in the toivn. 
His last published play, "The Tempest," was com- 
pleted in 1611. For the rest of his days he lived 
quietly in Sti^atford, dying on April 23, 1616, sup- 
posed to be his fifty-third birthday. 



2 William Shakespeare: An Appreciation 

FACTS. 

Three centuries ago tomorrow, on the fifty-second 
anniversary of his birth, William Shakespeare died. 
Of his outgoings and incomings we know next to 
nothing. Of his thinking and feeling — wondrous 
facts of brain and heart — we have a fuller knowl- 
edge and a sympathy more complete than of any 
other being save only the Divine Jew whose triumph 
over death and sin we also commemorate tomorrow. 

Shakespeare was a genius; that is to say, he was 
endowed with the godlike faculty — a creative imag- 
ination — a faculty enjoyed by but one in a genera- 
tion, a century, an aeon, a faculty possessed by him 
in such perfection that he seems to have experienced 
and to have understood the mental and emotional 
life of either sex, of every temperament, of all classes, 
conditions, ages and races. Because of this super- 
human gift, in all that makes truth and character 
real, palpitating, alive, 

Shakespeare Was a Historian. 

Projecting himself into the half-historic days of blind 
Homer, repathing a portion of the tenth year of the 
Trojan siege, he is now the green-goose Troilus 
stammering through the A B C of life and love, 
betrayed by his misplaced confidence in an unworthy 
woman, the false Cressida, and now the worldly-wise 
Ulysses craftily conning the X Y Z of aged experi- 
ence, concluding with his admonition to self-proud 
Achilles, "The fool slides o'er the ice that you should 
break," Shakespeare is a Greek of the Greeks. 

From scanty material he fashioned Coriolanus 
and Volumnia of the older age, the noble Brutus and 
his nobler wife, Portia, of the over-ripe republic, 
near-hero Antony and his courtesan Cleopatra, both 
suited to the gangrenous age of decadence, conspir- 
ing with Cassius, cowering with Casca, declaiming 
with Cicero, reciting the horrors of Titus Andronicus 
— Shakespeare was a Roman amongst Romans. 



William Shakespeare: An Appreciation 3 

Building upon the mere name "Cymbeline," he 
portrays the two civilizations that flourished on Eng- 
lish soil before the Saxon-coming, that of the Latin 
invaders, and that of the British dwellers. In those 
splendid lines of Albion's youth, he was the most 
impassioned of the Celts, the haughtiest of the Latins. 

Almost out of vacancy he so recreated Plantagenet 
England in the persons of King John, gentle Arthur, 
grandam Elinor, and ambitious Constance that his 
picture of the days of Magna Carta forms an au- 
thentic chapter in English history. 

In phrase exactly suited to the character he makes 
Richard II, last Plantagenet, poetize his crown av/ay 
to Henry, fourth of that name, and first of the House 
of Lancaster. 

With roll of drum and squeak of fife, he trans- 
forms Prince Hal from a madcap reveler into Henry 
V, the virile soldier of Agincourt, ideal king, and 
winsome wooer ^w* sweet Kate of France. 

Out of the mists of misfortune which enshroud 
the long reign of do-nothing Henry VI, he constructs 
from the "Pale ashes of the House of Lancaster" a 
not unlovely man, dupe of his wicked wife, Margaret. 

He breathed upon Richard III, and, with withered 
arm and crooked back, the ablest and vilest of the 
English kings limps his forever-detested, never-dying 
way across the stage of history. 

In Henry VIII, he causes Cromwell, Wolsey, the 
"Defender of the Faith," and virtuous Katherine of 
Arragon to make straight the avenue through which 
the modern age was ushered by great Queen Bess, 
child of Anne Boyelen, the age of which he, a writer 
of verse and play, was destined to become, and for 
three centuries to remain, the foremost figure of all 
this world in the worth of intellectual accomplish- 
ment. 

The most English of all the English, it only re- 
mained that he should draw his own time and class 
to complete the setting of his historical gallery, and 



/ 



4 William Shakespeare: An Appreciation 

that he did in Jack Falstaff's comic valentine, "The 
Merry Wives of Windsor," which transports us back 
to the taverns, the oaks, and the hedgerows of merry 
Old England, the home of Raleigh, Drake, Sydney, 
Burleigh, Kit Marlowe, rare Ben Jonson, and gentle 
Will Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare Is the Great Teacher, 
A philosopher not alone of the class-room and the 
study, but a practical philosopher of the laboratory 
method. His material was human life and character, 
his reagent that intuitive wisdom which comes we 
know not whence, and his crucible the glowing uni- 
versal heart of man. 

Thus he understands and makes us to understand 
the wise Prosper© and the beast Caliban in their 
struggle through "The Tempest" from barbarism to 
the culture (not kultur) of organized society. 

Thus euphuism bears the justice of an indiiferent 
deity to the most inconsequential of his handiwork, 
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona." 

Thus he takes us to the inevitable overthrow of 
pedantry and learning without wisdom when they 
come into conflict with sex and nature in "Love's 
Labor's Lost." 

Thus delightful Dogberry's conceit writes him- 
self "down an ass," amidst the consummate wisdom 
in poesy of that quartet of wit and love — Claudio, 
Hero, Benedick, and Beatrice — of "Much Ado About 
Nothing." 

Thus he teaches that profligacy and avarice will 
produce a "Timon of Athens"; that there is a modi- 
cum of truth, at least, in the homeopathic dogma that 
"Like cures like" to be found in "The Taming of the 
Shrew"; that technicality and, incidentally, justice 
may sometimes be defeated by straining the "quality 
of mercy" through the sieve of racial and national 
hate of "The Merchant of Venice"; and that there 
is some good in all mortals by conducting us through 
the fetid purlieu of "Measure for Measure," and 



William Shakespeare: An Appreciation 5 

"Pericles," and the sweet atmosphere of "The Win- 
ter's Tale." 

Thus he paints Helena, tender and hard, ugly yet 
beautiful, repulsive but exquisitely attractive, sur- 
rounded with doubtful circumstance, dulled by the 
sordid brass of dissipated Bertram and filthy Parol- 
les, for whom no better title could be found than 
"All's Well That Ends Well." 

Thus he draws us to the verge of the infernal 
fires that heat the crater of wedded male jealousy 
in the massacre of lion-hearted Othello and his ten- 
der victim, Desdemona, and thus, too, he shows how 
the acid jealousy of a female tongue corrodes the 
crystal plate of woman's happiness in the drollery 
of "The Comedy of Errors." 

Thus he breathes the calm peace of the philo- 
sophic court of the banished duke in those very for- 
ests of Arden now made diabolic by the roar of the 
enginery of hell and hate of humanity about Verdun, 
Ah, he could not now entitle those haunts "As You 
Like It," and consecrate their shell-blasted trees to 
the lines of doting Orlando, or the moralizings of 
the melancholy Jacques upon the "greasy citizen," 
the "jewel-headed toad," or "the Seven Ages of Man." 

Thus on "Twelfth Night" in Illyria, in another 
quarter of the theater of the Great War, somewhere 
between stricken Servia and the purple-waved Adri- 
atic, "concealment like a worm i' the bud" fed upon 
the "damask cheek" of that glorious girl, Viola, queen 
of modesty, twin female sovereign with Rosalind of 
the world's romance and comedy. 

Thus he marks Macbeth with the felon's brand, 
and breaks the mettle of his lady-wife with the 
deliriums, sleeping and waking, of their unhallowed 
progress to the throne of Scotland. 

Thus he converts the court of British "Lsar" into 
a shambles in which minds are overthrown, and lives 
outpoured to satiate filial ingratitude and the lust 
of illicit passion. 



6 William Shakespeare: An Appreciation 

Thus stretching his Titan limbs in the grove near 
Athens, turning from "What fools these mortals be," 
for recreation's sake, he creates the fairy world of 
the "Midsummer Night's Dream." 

Thus he writes the beautiful drama of "Romeo 
and Juliet," fresh as the morning air of spring, pure 
as an Easter lily, refreshing as the dew in the heart 
of the rose, true as the firmament, the most perfect 
love story ever penned by mortal mind. 

Thus he brings us to face the problem that puzzled 
the son of "Denmark's buried majesty," that has 
puzzled all unredeemed sons of men since the morn- 
ing stars first sang together, and that will continue 
to puzzle them until "the last syllable of recorded 
time," the problem of individual life, freedom of 
action, and moral responsibility for thoughts imag- 
ined and deeds done in the body — Hamlet's problem, 
the "to be or not to be" here, and in that "undiscov- 
ered country," where the "rest is silence." 

Finally, in all his teaching, Shakespeare incul- 
cates the highest morality, and places no premium 
upon vice by causing truth to succumb to wrong and 
falsehood. In the scheme of education of this teacher 
of his kind, virtue is always womanhood's crown, and 
purity the guerdon of manhood. 

Shakespeare Is the Greatest of the Poets. 

In witchery of words, in form and arrangement of 
phrases, in completeness and aptitude of figure, in 
strength of thought and loftiness of flight, he so far 
outdistances his nearest follower, that he becomes a 
benign sun to a reflecting planet — a sun which bears 
but one spot of tinct or shame, the theme of Venus 
and Adonis. 

Great and all pervasive as is this poetic quality 
throughout the plays, it attains its zenith in the 
matchless sonnets — at once the wonder and admira- 
tion of ail poets in all succeeding years. Shakespeare 
nowhere shows his clarity of vision and sanity of 
judgment to better advantage than he does in the 



William Shakespeare: An Appreciation 7 

sonnets themselves where he again and again assures 
his lines of an immortality more enduring than brass 
or marble. In all literature there is nothing more 
uplifting to the tired, hurt, and friendless soul than 
is to be found in the beautiful twenty-ninth sonnet; 

"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, 

I all alone beweep my outcast state, 
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries, 

And look upon myself and curse my fate. 
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 

Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd. 
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope. 

With what I most enjoy contented least; 
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, 

Haply I think on thee; and then my state, 
Like to the lark at break of day arising 

From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate; 
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings 

That then I scorn to change my state with kings." 

Robert Ingersoll has said in the most complete 
single figure of speech in our national literature: 

"Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean, whose 
waves touched all the shores of thought; within 
which were all the tides and waves of destiny and 
will; over which swept all the storms of fate, ambi- 
tion and revenge; upon which fell the gloom and 
darkness of despair and death and all the sunlight 
of content and love, and within which was the in- 
verted sky lit with the eternal stars — an intellectual 
ocean — towards which all rivers ran, and from which 
now the isles and continents of thought receive their 
dew and rain." 

To which may be added: 

Shakespeare was an intellectual continent, whose 
foundations were laid in the strata of almost perfect 
knowledge, resting upon igneous rocks fused in the 
heart-heat of passion and feeling. 

In whose surface soils, interspersed with sandy 



8 William Shakespeare: An Appreciation 

wastes of ignorance, flourished the flowers, fruits 
and forests of universal experience. 

From whose fields rose the fragrance of blossom, 
the strain of song-bird, and the gleam of green grass 
and golden grain. 

Through whose swamps crawled the saurians of 
shrinking shame, and coiled the serpents of slinking 
sin. 

Amidst whose jungles roared the lion of bravado; 
crouched the tiger of cruel hate; barked the wolf of 
avarice; prowled the jackal of scandal; screamed the 
hyena of treachery, and purred the panther of deceit. 

Through whose atmosphere the buzzard of unclean 
desire hovered its victim; the vulture of revenge 
stooped its prey; the eagle of ambition soared its 
lofty flight; the turtle of love cooed to its tender 
mate, and the lark of aspiration "rose to heaven's 
gate." 

An intellectual continent, whose watershed rose 
from plain, through mound and foot-hill, into tower- 
ing mountain-ranges, whose bosoms treasured the 
priceless ores of human sympathy, comfort, and con- 
tent; whose peaks pushed upward through the em- 
pyrean, beyond the snow-line of human suffering, 
above the clouds of finite endeavor, into the ever- 
silent spaces of ether where Genius bathed their 
remotest summits in perpetual sunshine, and con- 
densed the frost of failure and the dew of sorrow 
into living water which now trickled a rippling rill, 
now brawled a babbling brook, and now pulsed and 
swept a majestic river bearing peace, plenty and 
prosperity to mountain and hill, plain and field, 
meadow and marsh, as it "slipped on silver sandals 
to join the shining sea." 

Shakespeare is an intellectual uiorld, upon which 
memory has set the boundaries of the land, fancy 
has sketched the limits of the sea, and imagination 
has peopled both ocean and continent with all the 
real, wondrous inhabitants thereof. 



nnDnan 

Shakespeare was an intellectual planet which, 
sivimming once into the orbit of our ken, a vision 
splendid, can ne'er from hence depart again. 

DnnDDD 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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